Article excerpt

The $3.2 billion penalty comes less than a week after the bloc's
antitrust chief announced a new round of charges against Google.

The European Union's antitrust chief imposed a record fine of 2.9
billion euros on a group of truck makers on Tuesday, part of a trend
toward steeper penalties for competition violations in the bloc.

The fine, equal to $3.2 billion, focused on truck makers' efforts
to fix prices and to delay the installation of pollution-curbing
exhaust pipes and engines. The decision came less than a week after
the European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-member European
Union, announced a new round of antitrust charges against Google on
suspicion that some of the company's advertising products had
restricted consumer choice.

"We have, today, put down a marker by imposing record fines for a
serious infringement," Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's
competition commissioner, said in a statement.

"For 14 years, they colluded on the pricing and on passing on the
costs for meeting environmental standards to customers," the
statement continued. "This is also a clear message to companies that
cartels are not accepted."

Among the companies cited in the statement for having broken
antitrust rules is the truck maker MAN, which is owned by
Volkswagen. MAN is not among the companies being fined, however, as
it revealed the existence of the cartel.

Still, the announcement brought more bad news for Volkswagen,
which has been embroiled in a diesel emissions scandal that began in
the United States, and which recently set aside $14.7 billion to
compensate customers there for having installed software that made
its vehicles seem to pollute less than they were.

In the statement, the commission said it did not find any links
between the cartel and so-called defeat devices installed by
Volkswagen in passenger cars.

The truck makers being fined are DAF, Daimler, Iveco and Volvo-
Renault. Daimler faces the largest single fine, and it must pay
slightly more than EUR 1 billion, also a record.

Together, the five companies account for about nine in 10 medium
and heavy trucks produced in Europe, the commission said. …